How policy-makers use uncertainty information

How many vaccines will be available in the coming month? To what extent will traffic rise after corona? What will be the impact of sea level rising due to climate change? These are questions policy makers have to deal with: they have to make decisions, even though the information that they base their decision on remains uncertain. These policy makers receive reports with information, such as predictive models or scientific evidence. Even though there will always remain a level of uncertainty regarding the information they have to work with, there comes a point at which a decision has to be made. This, in turn, should motivate scientists and experts to think of the best ways of presenting evidence, including their estimates of the inherent uncertainty. With this research-project, I investigate how policy makers deal with uncertainty information. The main research question of this project is as follows: “How does the form in which uncertainty is communicated have an impact on the use of evidence by policy makers, and is this moderated by the magnitude of uncertainty?”. From 2021 until 2024, I will study this research question with a multidisciplinary approach, with scholars in epistemology, public management, and evidence-informed policy making. For this, I intend to use cutting-edge research methods, such as eye-tracking and computer simulations of opinion dynamics.